"Earlier this week Apple fired Scott Forstall, the architect of its iOS platform, and handed his duties over to the company's chief industrial designer, Jonathan Ive. Ive and Forstall had an infamously chilly working relationship, and one of their biggest disagreements was over the role of so-called 'skeuomorphic' design in Apple's products. Forstall, like his mentor Steve Jobs, favored it; Ive disliked it. To many observers, Forstall's forced exit looks like a vindication of Ive's stance. But if he wants to continue Apple's enviable trend of innovation, he'd be a fool to throw the baby of skeuomorphism out with Forstall's bathwater." Hoped for a thorough article on the benefits of skeuomorphism - got the age-old and intrinsically invalid excuse 'because it sells'. Windows isn't he best desktop operating system because it sells so well. Lady Gaga isn't the best artist because she sells a lot of records. This argument is never valid, has zero value, and adds nothing to what should be an interesting discussion.

I really don't understand the argument, could you possibly fill in the blanks left by the author?

Where is skuemorphic design good? Showing concrete examples would be a good thing. I think he briefly touched on the calculator in ios. How is the ios calculator better as a calculator because of its design than the one in android? There are only so many ways to do a calculator, almost all of the obvious ones are intuitive to anyone who's ever used one. I've only seen bad skeu, never good.